I Two Interpretations of the First Critique

Consider two competing interpretations of Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason: the epistemic and
cognitive interpretations. The epistemic
interpretation presents the first Critique as a work
of epistemology, but what is more, it sees Kant as an early
proponent of anti-psychologism—the view that descriptions of how
the mind works are irrelevant for epistemology. Even if Kant does
not always manage to purge certain psychological-sounding idioms
from his writing, the epistemic interpretation has it, he is
perfectly clear that he means his evaluation of knowledge to be
carried out independently of psychology. In contrast, the cognitive
interpretation presents the first Critique as a
description of the operation of human cognitive
faculties—sensibility, the understanding, and reason. Whatever else
the first Critique might be on this interpretation, it
is at least Kant's articulation of a theory of mind.

I want to argue that the cognitive interpretation is the right
one. However, my argument will be somewhat indirect, and will take
us deep into the woods of the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure
Concepts of the Understanding: I argue that the dissolution of a
long-standing interpretive problem about the second edition version
of the Deduction is available only on the cognitive interpretation.
That problem is one of understanding the second edition Deduction's
division into apparently redundant parts. (I will call this problem
the division problem). It is a problem about the interpretation of
the Deduction's gross structure, and without a solution to it, we
have no way even to identify which sections of the Deduction carry
out its central tasks.

While disagreeing about how exactly to divide the Deduction into
its different parts, and about what the tasks of those different
parts are, many interpreters have agreed that the Deduction is an
argument somehow divided into two parts. In §II, I consider one
such interpretation, and show how it fails to solve the division
problem.

In §§III-X, I argue that we can dissolve the division problem by
recognizing that in fact the Deduction is a series of three
descriptions of a single cognitive operation, the understanding's
synthesis of the manifold of intuition. Together, these
descriptions constitute a three-part explanation of how the
understanding synthesizes the manifold of intuition. The three
parts thereby explain the possibility of objects in intuition
conforming to the understanding's categorial structure. In so
doing, I will argue, they both carry out the Deduction's positive
task and entail certain negative consequences for the possibility
of metaphysical cognition. On the positive side, they explain the
validity of pure concepts of the understanding for objects
appearing in a faculty that is entirely distinct from the
understanding, namely, sensibility. On the negative side, and as a
consequence of the details of this explanation, they limit the
categories' validity to objects of experience.

Subsequently, and crucially for my purposes, I argue in §XI that
just those features of my interpretation that resolve the division
problem entail that the cognitive interpretation is right. Finally,
in §§XII-XIII, I draw attention to some points that the epistemic
interpretation gets right, and I indicate how we must understand
the cognitive interpretation so as to accommodate those points.

II The Deduction as an Argument and the Division Problem

The division problem concerns why Kant divides the Deduction
into apparently redundant parts. In particular, it is a problem of
understanding the relation between the conclusions in §§20 and 26,
which at first glance seem to establish the very same thing:
namely, the categories' validity for objects of intuition. By
Kant's account, what he establishes in §20 is that we have, through
the categories, a priori cognition of objects of an intuition
in general (Kant, 1997 [1787], B159). In other
words, he has explained the possibility of objects of an intuition
in general conforming to the categories. Since the task of the
Deduction is to explain the possibility of objects conforming to
the categories, Kant seems to have completed that task. Yet the
Deduction contains a further seven sections. Kant does not take
himself to be done at §20; instead, he says that his results there
constitute only a 'beginning...

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